222 2 Attitudes of Gall to Gaedhel in Scotland in Scotland before John of Fordunbefore John of Fordun DAUVIT BROUN It is generally held that the idea of Scotland’s division between Gaelic ‘Highlands’ and Scots or English ‘Lowlands’ can be traced no further back than the mid to late fourteenth century. One example of the association of the Gaelic language with the highlands from this period is found in Scalacronica (‘Ladder Chronicle’), a chronicle in French by the Northumbrian knight, Sir Thomas Grey. Grey and his father had close associations with Scotland, and so he cannot be treated simply as representing an outsider’s point of view. 1 His Scottish material is likely to have been written sometime between October 1355 and October 1359.2 He described how the Picts had no wives and so acquired them from Ireland, ‘on condition that their offspring would speak Irish, which language remains to this day in the highlands among those who are called Scots’. 3 There is also an example from the ‘Highlands’ themselves. In January 1366 the papacy at Avignon issued a mandate to the bishop of Argyll granting Eoin Caimbeul a dispensation to marry his cousin, Mariota Chaimbeul. It was explained (in words which, it might be expected,
1See especially Alexander Grant, ‘The death of John Comyn: what was going on?’, SHR 86 (2007) 176–224, at 207–9. 2He began to work sometime in or after 1355 while he was a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, and finished the text sometime after David II’s second marriage in April 1363 (the latest event noted in the work); but he had almost certainly finished this part of the chronicle before departing for France in 1359: see Sir Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, 1272–1363 , ed. Andy King (Surtees Society: Woodbridge 2005), xix–xxi. 3... sure condicioun qe lour issu parlascent Irrays, quel patois demurt a iour de huy, hu haute pays entre lez vns, qest dit Escotoys : ibid ., 22; W. F. Skene, Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots (Edinburgh 1867), 199. By ‘Irish’, of course, Grey means Gaelic. The statement appears in a passage which Grey interpolated into a Scottish king list plus origin legend; see Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Woodbridge 1999), 91–5. 50 DAUVIT BROUN would have echoed Eoin’s supplication) that the pool of eligible partners was restricted due, among other things, to ‘the diversity of dialects between the highlands, in which the said Eoin and Mariota dwell, and the lowlands of Scotland’. 4 For an example directly from the ‘Lowlands’ we might naturally turn to the oft repeated passage in Book II of John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish People discussed by Martin MacGregor in the previous chapter. 5 There (it will be recalled) the Gaelic speaking inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands are described uncharitably as ‘a wild and untamed race, primitive and proud, given to plunder and the easy life’, in contrast to ‘Teutonic’ speakers in the Lowlands, who are touchingly portrayed as ‘home loving, civilised, trustworthy, tolerant and polite’. 6 This account is so vivid and detailed that it is little wonder that so many historians have made it the starting point of their discussion of Scotland’s perceived division into ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’. Unfortunately its date and authorship can no longer be regarded as straightforward issues. W. F. Skene, whose edition of Fordun’s Chronicle was published in 1871, maintained that most of the work (including Book II) was completed in the mid 1380s. 7 Skene’s reasoning has, however, been challenged by Donald Watt, editor of the new text and translation of Bower’s Scotichronicon (a much expanded version of Fordun’s 4Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers, Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters , vol. iv, A.D. 1362–1404 , prepared by W. H. Bliss and J. A. Twemlow (London 1902), 56. These individuals are identified and the marriage dispensation discussed in Stephen Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh 2006), 73–4. 5See 7, above. 6Johannis de Fordun Chronica Gentis Scotorum , ed. W. F. Skene and trans. Felix J. H. Skene, 2 vols. (Edinburgh 1871–2) [ Chron. Fordun ] i, 42; ii, 38. The best translation is in Alexander Grant, ‘Aspects of national consciousness in medieval Scotland’, in Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past , edd. Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (Copenhagen 1994), 68–95, at 76–7, where he discusses problems posed by the terms gens , nacio and populus . 7Chron. Fordun i, xxx–xxxiii. He regarded his MS D (Dublin, Trinity College MS 498), which consists only of Book V and Gesta Annalia to 1363, as the earliest stage in Fordun’s work, with books I to IV not completed until 1385. MS D, however, plainly represents an abbreviated text (see Broun, The Irish Identity , 73 n. 55). ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 51
Chronicle ). Initially Watt pointed to possible indications that Fordun may still have been active as late as 1389 or 1390, but that it might also be suggested that he died as early as 1363. 8 Elsewhere Watt argued firmly for the earlier date. 9 Scholars in the interim have opted for either the mid 1360s or the mid 1380s, or various points in between. This makes it difficult to decide whether the famous passage in Book II of the Chronicle should be set alongside the comments of Thomas Grey and the dispensation granted to Eoin Caimbeul and Mariota Chaimbeul as potentially an early statement of the ‘Highland/Lowland divide’, or whether it should be viewed as belonging to nearly a generation later. Should Fordun be regarded as a self conscious innovator, or as simply an elaborator of what had become a familiar way of imagining Scotland? The problem of dating the passage is even more pressing if we follow Professor Barrow’s remark that ‘the reign of Robert II [1371–90] seems extraordinarily early for the emergence of so clear cut a dichotomy between highland and lowland Scotland’. 10 The dating of Fordun’s work is complicated by the fact that the text (or, rather, texts) attributed to him have pointed to different conclusions. The Chronicle itself (consisting of five books) goes no further than 1153 and ends with a genealogy of David I obtained (we are told) from Walter Wardlaw, bishop of Glasgow, who is referred to as a cardinal. This would point firmly to a date sometime between
8Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. iii, edd. and trans. John and Winifred MacQueen, and D. E. R. Watt (Edinburgh 1995), xvi–xvii. 9D. E. R. Watt, ‘Fordun, John ( d. in or after 1363)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , edd. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford 2004) [ODNB ] xx, 355–7. Note also the passing reference to the 1360s as the date of Fordun’s work, in Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, vol. ix, ed. D. E. R. Watt (Edinburgh 1998), xi. This earlier dating was anticipated (but not discussed) in Grant, ‘Aspects of national consciousness in medieval Scotland’, 76. 10 G. W. S. Barrow, Scotland and its Neighbours in the Middle Ages (London 1992), 105 (in a paper originally published as ‘The lost Gàidhealtachd of medieval Scotland’, in Gaelic and Scotland: Alba agus a’ Ghàidhlig , ed. William Gillies (Edinburgh 1989), 67–88). 52 DAUVIT BROUN
23 December 1383 and 23 August 1387.11 In some of the manuscripts, however, other texts have been appended, including material known to scholarship as Gesta Annalia , which runs from St Margaret’s English royal ancestors as far as 1363. In some cases this has been continued fairly chaotically to 1385 (probably by a later scribe). Donald Watt regarded Gesta Annalia as a separate work by Fordun which originally stopped in the middle of 1363 because he died that year or soon afterwards. 12 This, of course, requires that the reference to Cardinal Wardlaw (and other indications of a date during Robert II’s reign, 1371–90 13 ) be seen as later additions.14 All these assumptions about the genesis of Fordun’s Chronicle and its relationship with Gesta Annalia have now been challenged, and the extent of Fordun’s own contribution has been called into question. The disposition of Gesta Annalia in the manuscripts, and its relationship to other chronicles, has been used to show that it consisted originally of a text ending in 1285. 15 (For convenience this first part of Gesta Annalia has been dubbed ‘ Gesta Annalia I’, and the later addition of material covering the years 1285–1363 ‘ Gesta Annalia II’.) Gesta Annalia I, in turn, has been shown to be the only surviving part of an earlier version of Fordun’s Chronicle (dubbed ‘Proto Fordun’) which was probably completed in 1285. 16 ‘Proto Fordun’ itself appears to have been an expanded version of an even earlier work attributable to Richard Vairement, a Frenchman who
11 Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh 2007), 262. 12 Watt, ‘Fordun, John’, ODNB xx, 355–7. 13 For example, the Stewart castle of Rothesay is described as ‘royal’: Chron. Fordun i, 43. I am grateful to Steve Boardman for discussing this issue with me. 14 The evidence for a date as late as 1389 or even 1390 is restricted to one branch of the stemma, and should therefore be regarded as additions by a copyist/redactor: see Dauvit Broun, ‘A new look at Gesta Annalia attributed to John of Fordun’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland , ed. B. E. Crawford (Edinburgh 1999), 9–30, at 10–11. 15 Broun, ‘A new look at Gesta Annalia ’ (building on Watt’s realisation that the Chronica and Gesta Annalia were separate works). 16 Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain , 216–29. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 53 came to Scotland in the service of Marie de Coucy, Alexander II’s second queen, in 1239 and who is last heard of in Scotland in 1267. 17 This raises an alarming range of possibilities about the authorship of the passage on the ‘Highland/Lowland’ divide which could, of course, have important implications for our understanding of when and how such ideas were first formulated. Was it penned by Vairement no later (probably) than the 1260s, or by the author of ‘Proto Fordun’ in 1285? Or should it still be ascribed to Fordun himself, whose own contributions can now be securely dated to the mid 1380s? 18 Unfortunately the application of this recent work on Fordun’s Chronicle specifically to the famous section on ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ is not sufficiently clear cut to permit a confident answer. Instead of using the passage as a springboard for a discussion of the origins of the ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy, therefore, it will be set aside so that the subject of when and how this dichotomy first took root in a Scottish context can be explored afresh. Only after this has been attempted will the question of its authorship be broached again. It should be said at once that the scope for such a reinvestigation appears at first sight to be very limited. There is nothing in the secondary literature to suggest that, with or without the famous passage attributed to Fordun, there is any reason to suppose that the ‘Highland/Lowland’ division existed in any meaningful sense much before Fordun’s day. The most influential discussion of the earlier absence of this phenomenon is Geoffrey Barrow’s article ‘The Highlands in the lifetime of Robert the Bruce’. 19 His scene setting remarks are strikingly clear on the subject: 20 17 Vairement’s career is discussed in G. W. S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots. Government, Church and Society from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century , 2 nd edn. (Edinburgh 2003), 192–3 and D. E. R. Watt, A Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Graduates to A.D. 1410 (Oxford 1977), 559–60. 18 The formal caveat explained in Broun, ‘A new look at Gesta Annalia ’, 27–8 (n. 85a) carries little weight on its own. 19 Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots , 2 nd edn, 332–49, originally published in The Stewarts 12 (1963–7), 26–46. 20 Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots , 2 nd edn, 332. 54 DAUVIT BROUN
Neither in the chronicle nor in the record of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do we hear of anything equivalent to the ‘Highland Line’ of later times. Indeed, the very terms ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ have no place in the considerable body of written evidence surviving from the period before 1300. ‘Ye hielands and ye lawlans, oh whaur hae ye been?’ The plain answer is that they do not seem to have been anywhere: in those terms, they had simply not entered the minds of men. He then asked why this should have been so. He observed: 21 Between mountain and plain there was then no religious barrier, and the Gaelic language must have been perfectly familiar up and down the east coast from the Ord of Caithness to Queensferry. It must, moreover, still have been the ordinary working language of Carrick and the rest of Galloway. The social and agrarian pattern of Scotland may have had regional variations, but there was no significant variation between highlands and lowlands, as there came to be later. He qualified this, however, by noting ‘the poverty of the soil and its unsuitability for settled agriculture’ in the highlands, as against the lowlands where, in the thirteenth century, ‘agriculture already predominated’. 22 In the end he remarked that ‘in later times the history of Scotland was to take a course which both engendered and aggravated a schism between highlands and lowlands, but if we search for the beginnings of that schism as early as the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we search in vain’. 23 The study of this schism before 1300 is nevertheless the principal objective of this paper. It is not, however, based on any straightforward disagreement with specific statements made by Barrow and others about the non existence of a ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy. Neither is it to deny that ‘Lowland’ consciousness of ‘Highlands’ may have changed in the mid fourteenth century.24 The
21 Ibid ., 333. 22 Ibid ., 336. 23 Ibid ., 349. 24 I am grateful to Stephen Boardman for clarifying this point for me. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 55 point of departure for this essay is that the way the ‘Highland/Lowland divide’ has usually been conceived by historians is open to question. It will be argued that, as a result of this reappraisal, the existence in the ‘Lowlands’ of a polarised view of Gaels and non Gaels, far from disappearing, actually becomes easier to recognise significantly earlier than 1300. The consensus that ‘Highlands’ first appears in the mid to late fourteenth century is based on more than simply the silence of earlier records. It is supported by discussions of political, social, economic or cultural developments which have offered attractive ways to explain why the ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy apparently began to manifest itself at that particular time. It has been argued, for example, that this reflected the relatively recent retreat of Gaelic to the Highlands, so that it was possible for the first time to think that mountain folk and Gaelic went together. A striking visual statement of this is a map published by Ranald Nicholson in which a line representing Scotland’s linguistic and cultural division wanders conjecturally across the fringes of higher ground from the Lennox north east towards the Braes of Angus and Braemar and then back north west towards Inverness. 25 Alexander Grant has added to this considerably by pointing to the destabilisation of Moray as a possible political context for the view of Highlanders as wild and dangerous. Grant has also argued that the distinction between the pastoral Highlands and agricultural Lowlands may have become more pronounced after the plagues of 1349 and 1363. 26 How obvious was all this to contemporaries? It would be dangerous to assume that the perception of a ‘Highland/Lowland 25 Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh 1974). A much more extensive area is assigned to Gaelic ca 1400 in Atlas of Scottish History to 1707 , edd. Peter G. B. McNeill and Hector L. MacQueen (Edinburgh 1996), 427, although this conflicts with the text accompanying the map (420), where Gaelic is said to have been extinct by 1350 in Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan. 26 Alexander Grant, Independence and Nationhood. Scotland 1306–1469 (London 1984), 200–9. For the political situation in Moray, see also Stephen I. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings, Robert II and Robert III, 1371–1406 (East Linton 1996), 46–8, 72–9. 56 DAUVIT BROUN divide’ (whenever that was, and in whatever form) was necessarily espoused by everyone in the ‘Lowlands’. It is not simply that ‘Lowlanders’ can be identified who deployed the stereotype of ‘savage Highlanders’ in a positive rather than a negative fashion; 27 it must be doubted whether all ‘Lowlanders’, even those among the ruling elite, would have used the stereotype at all. An important case in point is John Barbour. In 1376 he wrote his massive masterpiece in Scots, The Bruce , vividly recounting the exploits of Robert I and Sir James Douglas. Gaels appear frequently in his narrative, and are regularly described as ‘Irish’ (for instance, the Irschery ... off Arghile and the Ilis ).28 But there is no trace of stereotype or prejudice in his treatment of the Gaels of Scotland or Ireland. He included a full account of Edward Bruce’s campaign in Ireland; but even when he described how Edward’s Irish allies failed to stand and fight with him in the final fatal battle at Dundalk because pitched battles were not their way of conducting warfare, Barbour did not disparage Irschery , or make any adverse comment about cowardice or disloyalty, despite the fact that their departure left Edward hopelessly outnumbered, and that Barbour had just recounted how Edward upbraided his Scottish captains for suggesting a tactical retreat. 29 27 E. J. Cowan, ‘The discovery of the Gàidhealtachd in sixteenth century Scotland’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 60 (1997–8) 259–84. It may be noted that an identification of Scots with desperate plunderers living in the mountains is found in one of the accounts of Scottish origins incorporated into what became Fordun’s Chronicle . There it is described how the Scoti , while they were in Spain, were compelled to live wretchedly in the Pyrenees with barely anything to eat or any decent clothes to wear, and were driven to plundering their neighbours: Broun, The Irish Identity , 77, and 48 for text (section XX.2bc). The best translation is Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. i, edd. and trans. John and Winifred MacQueen (Edinburgh 1993), 53. 28 In the battle at Byland: Barbour’s Bruce , edd. Matthew P. McDiarmid and James A. C. Stevenson, 3 vols. (Scottish Text Society: Edinburgh, 1980–5) iii, 202 (XVIII, ll. 443–5); John Barbour, The Bruce , ed. and trans. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh 1997), 687–8. 29 Barbour’s Bruce , edd. McDiarmid and Stevenson iii, 186–9 (XVIII, ll. 25–89); The Bruce , ed. and trans. Duncan, 667–70. Barbour’s attitude contrasts sharply with ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 57
It is not clear, indeed, that Barbour even regarded ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Highland’ as synonymous. It is true that he described Robert I’s battalion at Bannockburn as consisting of ‘all the men from Carrick, Argyll and Kintyre, and [those men] of the Isles whose lord was Aengus of Islay; and as well as all these, he also had a great host of armed men from the plane land ’. 30 The reference to plane land here may simply be topographical, however, contrasting with Carrick, Argyll, Kintyre and the Isles, and need not imply a rough and ready distinction between non Gaels and Gaels. It is striking, moreover, that he does not refer to an amorphous mass of ‘highlanders’, but lists specific regions and lordships (including Robert I’s own home territory of Carrick 31 ): it is the ‘lowland’ contingent which is presented indiscriminately. The little that is known of Barbour’s background and career suggest that his contact with Gaelic culture was probably limited to King Robert II’s court, the immediate audience for The Bruce .32 Barbour spent most of his adult life as archdeacon of Aberdeen,
Walter Bower (1385–1449), abbot of Inchcolm, who managed to twist Bede’s description of Ireland as bereft of snakes and an ‘antidote to poison’ by stating that SS. Patrick, Columba, and Bridget made the land and animals ‘cleansed from all harmful infection so that the people might have a polished mirror for the contemplation of their own appearance and the reformation of their uncouth and uncivilised behaviour’, which was necessary because they had ‘such hearts full of deceit and wickedness and with such a propensity for theft, plundering and murder’: Scotichronicon i, edd. and trans. MacQueen and MacQueen (Edinburgh 1993), 47. 30 Barbour’s Bruce , edd. McDiarmid and Stevenson iii, 14 (XI, ll. 339–46); The Bruce , ed. and trans. Duncan, 420–3. 31 Robert was born at Turnberry in 1274 and became earl of Carrick in 1292. Robert I’s home milieu has been vividly described in G. W. S. Barrow, Robert the Bruce and the Scottish Identity (Edinburgh 1984), esp. 16–17: ‘As far as we can tell, Annandale and the English Honour of Huntingdon meant very little to him, but the Firth of Clyde, the Scottish islands and Ireland seem always to have counted for much … In Robert Bruce we do not see the stereotyped image of an Anglo Norman knight or the flower of chivalry of Barbour’s spirited poem, but rather a potentate in the immemorial mould of the western Gaidhealtachd’ (although Barrow continues by saying that there was more to Robert Bruce than simply that). 32 For the Gaelic element in Robert II’s court, which was frequently located in Gaelic areas, see chapter 3. 58 DAUVIT BROUN where he may have met John of Fordun (if, indeed, Fordun was a chantry priest in Aberdeen cathedral, as was claimed in a text written approximately half a century or more after Fordun’s death). 33 Barbour can hardly be dismissed as a maverick voice, therefore. It seems that some other explanation of the vision of a ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy in Fordun’s Chronicle is needed than simply that its author (whoever he was) was a ‘Lowlander’. A more specific problem is that some of the emerging differences which have been claimed as dividing ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ by the mid to late fourteenth century are more apparent than real. As Geoffrey Barrow has observed, Fordun ‘must have been greatly oversimplifying a complex situation’. 34 It would be absurd, for example, to take the linguistic division too literally. An historical geographer’s map of how two languages meet does not typically have a simple boundary line between them (unless some profound social division is involved), but deploys a wide vocabulary of shading based on a patchwork of small areas. 35 In the absence of a critical mass of data, we should assume that this was also true in medieval Scotland. Indeed, in general terms, both socially as well as culturally, the true situation is likely to have been equally complex. As Kenneth Nicholls has aptly remarked, ‘the Highlands also included a vast intermediate 33 In an addition to the prologue of Bower’s Scotichronicon in a copy of the work (London British Library MS Royal 13 E.X) made for Paisley abbey sometime (probably) after Bower’s death on 24 December 1449 and before the death of Pope Nicholas V, 24 March 1455: see Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English , vol. ix, ed. D. E. R. Watt (Edinburgh 1998), 2–3 (text and translation), 9, and 186. Bower, recounting a discussion of Fordun’s work by some men of learning, said that a ‘venerable scholar’ recalled his acquaintance with Fordun himself ( ibid ., 2–3). Fordun probably died sometime after December 1383 (Broun, ‘A new look at Gesta Annalia ’, 27–8), but if this story is to be believed, he may not have lived for much more than a decade after 1383. 34 Barrow, Scotland and its Neighbours , 106. 35 See, for example, the techniques deployed for mapping Welsh speakers in Wales in 1991 in John Aitchison and Harold Carter, A Geography of the Welsh Language 1961–1991 (Cardiff 1994), ch. 6. The standard work for Gaelic is Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic in Scotland, 1698–1981: The Geographical History of a Language (Edinburgh 1984): see esp. the maps in chapter X. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 59 zone, Lennox, Atholl and Breadalbane, Strathspey, the Aird and Sutherland, Bute and Arran ...’, so that ‘... the Highlands do not seem to have a frontier. Instead they had that very different thing, a transitional zone’. 36 If this situation could be imagined in greatly oversimplified terms in the mid to late fourteenth century, then why not earlier? This is not a hypothetical question. In Book XV (De regionibus ) of the great encyclopaedia, De Proprietatibus Rerum , completed ca 1245 by Bartholomew the Englishman, it is observed that most Scots these days had been improved through intermingling with the English, except for ‘wild men’ ( silvestres ), Scots and Irish, who adhered to the clothing, language, food and other customs of their forefathers. 37 When Book XV of Bartholomew’s work was translated into French in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, ‘wild men’ was rendered as ‘those of them who live in the wastelands’. 38 Clearly the specific association of Gaelic language and culture with uncultivated terrain had entered the mind of at least one foreign scholar as early as 1250×75. The link between Gaelic and wastelands in this instance need only have been derived from Bartholomew’s reference to silvestres ,
36 Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Celtic contrasts: Ireland and Scotland’, History Ireland 7 no. 3 (Autumn 1999) 22–6, at 23–4 (drawing on a paper given to the Colloquium of Scottish Medieval and Renaissance Research at Pitlochry on 7 January 1995). 37 For the Latin of this passage (with translation) see 15 and n.19 (above). A new edition of the encyclopaedia is in progress, but Book XV has not yet been published: Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum , edd. Christel Meier et al ., vols. i and vi (Turnhout 2007). The only complete scholarly version of the text is On the Properties of Things: John of Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum: a Critical Text , edd. M. C. Seymour et al. , 3 vols. (Oxford 1975–88) (the passage on Scotland is at vol. ii, 812). Bartholomew was an early Franciscan teacher and administrator, who taught in Paris and held high office in Germany and central Europe: see M. C. Seymour et al ., Bartholomaeus Anglicus and his Encyclopedia (Aldershot 1992), 1–10, and 29–33 for dating the work to ca 1245. 38 les uns de eus ki habitant es guastines : Le Livre des Regions par Barthélemy L’Anglais , ed. Brent A. Pitts (Anglo Norman Text Society: London 2006), 43. This Anglo Norman French translation survives in only one manuscript, so it is unlikely to have been particularly influential. For the manuscript and its dating, see ibid ., 2–3. 60 DAUVIT BROUN
‘wild men’, rather than from any knowledge of even an approximate coincidence of Gaelic with highlands. In the light of this, can it be assumed that the ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy visible in the later middle ages was necessarily grounded in reality at all? Have historians been too ready to suppose that ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ first appeared because of a coincidence of circumstances: political, social, economic, and cultural? Although the influence of cultural stereotypes has been recognised by some commentators, it has been suggested that these coloured, but did not create, the dichotomy itself.39 The relationship between image and reality is, however, likely to have been more complex. Other explanations of the immediate cause of the ‘Highland/Lowland’ division need to be considered, especially in the light of similar stereotyped oppositions. No one would deny that the pejorative elements in the depiction of Highlanders in Fordun’s Chronicle have a much longer history in European culture. 40 It is the image of the barbarian, the fierce warrior, lazy and lawless, who lives unkempt in inhospitable territory and threatens the cosy, ordered world of industrious decent people who live in towns and lush countryside. This vision of barbarity versus civilisation can be traced from antiquity to modern times. It has been applied in different contexts Roman versus non Roman, Christian versus pagan, ‘reformed’ Latin Christendom versus ‘unreformed’ and adapted accordingly, with some elements emphasised or elaborated and others ignored. 41 It has perceptively been remarked by W. G. 39 E.g., Wilson McLeod, Divided Gaels. Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland c.1200–c.1650 (Oxford 2004), 18, in which the ideological aspect of the passage in Fordun is noted, but explanations are still sought primarily in the social, political and cultural conditions of the mid to late fourteenth century. 40 See also 11, above. 41 For example, in a Scottish context, although reference is made in the passage in Fordun’s Chronicle to a propensity to plunder, deceit is not included as a ‘Highland’ trait: indeed, its author goes out of his way, it seems, to emphasise their potential loyalty and obedience to the law (see below, 76). This contrasts with Bower’s dramatic comment that ‘poisonous deeds are perpetrated to such an extent among the Irish and among highland and wild Scots whom we call Catervans or Ketherans, that, ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 61
Jones, in the conclusion of his survey of this imagery in Europe from late Antiquity to the Renaissance, that ‘the image of the “barbarian”, whatever its specific historical context and to whomever applied, was the invention of civilized man who thereby expressed his own strong sense of cultural and moral superiority’. 42 Now, it might be expected that the authors of the more articulate expressions of this imagery (such as the Byzantine historian Agathias in his History , or Gerald of Wales in his accounts of the Irish and Welsh, or to a lesser extent the unknown author of the oft quoted passage in Fordun’s Chronicle ) included some ‘real’, if generalised, observations. But a crucial point has been made by Patrick Amory in relation to Agathias which applies equally to the passage in Fordun’s Chronicle : ‘just because details could be correct does not mean that we must accept the whole framework ... as a transparent or objective template’. 43 The depiction of ‘barbarians’, it may be suggested, is rooted in the need of some people to promote themselves as ‘civilized’. It is the self consciousness of the ‘civilized’ which creates ‘barbarians’. The question, then, would be not so much whether something like the ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy arose from a deepening differentiation between two cultures, but whether the political, economic and social conditions of those who saw themselves as civilized might explain their need to espouse this imagery. The most as it is written, “They lie in wait for someone’s blood. They hide their snares against the innocent for no cause; seizing anything that is of value they fill their caves with spoils and contrive deceit against their own lives” ’: Scotichronicon i, edd. and trans. MacQueen and MacQueen, 49. 42 W. G. Jones, ‘The image of the barbarian in medieval Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971) 376–407, quotation at 405. 43 Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge 1997), 18 n. 12 (the italics are original). For Agathias on barbarians, see Averil Cameron, Agathias (Oxford 1970), 116–17. Cameron observes (at 117) that, ‘in line with ancient ethnological tradition and with Procopius, Agathias took it for granted that ‘barbarian’ equalled ‘lawless’’; Agathias also assumed that a barbarian would be unable to cope with classical learning. There were social and cultural differences between Byzantines and Persians or Franks, but Agathias’s presentation of this was clearly not objective, and depended heavily on established ways of thinking about his own culture and society, and about those outside it’. 62 DAUVIT BROUN direct explanation, indeed, may be ideological. The idea of ‘civilization’ is never found in a vacuum, but is typically espoused as part of broader framework of social norms and certainties, particularly when these are being actively promoted or vigorously defended. When considering the origins of the ‘Highland/Lowland’ divide, moreover, it is far from clear that we should be limited to these terms in particular. Discussion of the existence of a perceived ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy has to date been determined quite literally by the presence or absence of these topographical labels. This may seem a natural way to focus the discussion when writing in a language, such as English, in which the topographical dimension is given primacy. This would not be true, however, when writing in Gaelic, where the equivalent terms for the ‘Highlands’ and the ‘Lowlands’ are A’ Ghàidhealtachd and A’ Ghalldachd . In Gaelic it is the cultural, and specifically the linguistic aspect of the dichotomy which is headlined. This alternative terminology would be less significant if it could be assumed that both linguistic and topographical aspects emerged simultaneously. But such an assumption has never been tested. It would be unwise, therefore, to put too much emphasis on the significance of the terms ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ without examining the possibility that, by the time these appear to be widely used, a dichotomy perceived in linguistic or other terms may have already been well established. If this is so, the Gaelic terms Gall and Gaedhel would provide a more helpful frame of reference than the equivalent topographical terms, ‘Lowlander’ and ‘Highlander’, in English. What emerges from the survey of attitudes to Gaels in texts written and/or extracted by monks and clerics in the Scottish kingdom before 1300 is that the association of Gaels with ‘Highlands’ did not represent the beginning of a perceived ‘schism’, but signified the development of an existing stereotype of Gaels as barbarians. It is noteworthy that the basis of the dichotomy as far as Fordun’s Chronicle , Grey, and the papal mandate of 1366 were concerned was not topography but language. ‘Diversity of dialects’ was the key ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 63 factor which was said to have been an obstacle to intermarriage between those in the Highlands and Lowlands; it was language, not residence in the Highlands, which in Grey’s eyes marked out the descendants of the Irish wives of the Picts. In Fordun’s Chronicle , moreover, the celebrated passage begins with the comment that ‘the character of the Scots varies according to the difference in language’. In these examples the topographical element could be purely locational: in other words, ‘highlands’ may have been intended, rather than ‘Highlands’ replete with the wider cultural and social ramifications of that term in modern English usage. In Fordun’s Chronicle , the people who spoke lingua Theutonica are situated not in general terms in the plains or lowlands, but more precisely ‘by the sea coast and the plains’, and those who spoke lingua Scotica are not simply of the mountains, but are placed with care in ‘the mountains and outlying islands’. In each case the perspective of land and sea is more apparent than a crude topographical label. In looking for evidence for the earlier appearance in Scotland of the image of the barbarian we should seek to be as inclusive as possible, and so avoid the risk of distortion due to concentrating chiefly on only one or two key elements. The bottom line is that the stereotype should have been used by one sector of Scottish society to contrast itself positively with another. The best source, of course, must be material written within the bounds of the Scottish kingdom. Sadly, very little survives. One of the most important extant manuscripts from Scotland in this period is the Chronicle of Melrose (London, British Library Cotton Julius B. XIII fos 2–47 + London, British Library Cotton Faustina B. IX fos 2–75). This was continued in fits and starts at Melrose throughout most of the thirteenth century.44 Another key source is the material associated with St
44 Dauvit Broun and Julian Harrison, The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey: a Stratigraphic Edition , vol.i, Introduction and Facsimile Edition (Woodbridge 2007). The earlier facsimile edition is The Chronicle of Melrose from the Cottonian Manuscript, Faustina B ix in the British Museum: a complete and full size facsimile in collotype , with intro. by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, and index by William Croft Dickinson (London 1936). 64 DAUVIT BROUN
Margaret in Madrid, Royal Palace Library, MS II. 2097, a Dunfermline manuscript produced during the reign of James III (1460–88). All but one of the texts (Turgot’s Life of Margaret ) survive only in this manuscript and evidently originated in Dunfermline in the thirteenth century. The most important is the Miracles of St Margaret of Scotland .45 A fundamental point is that the chroniclers of Melrose did not regard themselves as Scoti . In the account of events in 1258 (written into the chronicle in the following year, or soon thereafter) we are told that ‘Scots and Galwegians, who were in the army [which had assembled at Roxburgh], returning home unhappily, pillaged the country in many ways’. 46 When Alexander III called his army together again in September in Roxburghshire, ‘the Scots and Galwegians devastated almost the whole of that country’. 47 It has also been observed that, in the Miracles of St Margaret , there is one occasion where a Scotus is contrasted with a ‘local girl’ ( puella indigena ), so that ‘clearly the monks of thirteenth century 48 Dunfermline did not see themselves unequivocally as ‘Scots’ ’. A non identification with Scoti may also be detected in the ‘Holyrood Chronicle’, a much briefer and more jejune text than its counterpart
45 The Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland , ed. and trans. Robert Bartlett (Oxford 2003). 46 ... Scoti et Galwithienses qui in exercitu fuerunt ... infeliciter ad propria reuertentes patriam in multis expoliauerunt : BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fo. 59r (Stratum 25, entered sometime after 2 February 1259 and probably before mid 1264: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 157–8); Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 115; Early Sources of Scottish History A.D. 500–1286 , collected and trans. Alan Orr Anderson, 2 vols. (Edinburgh 1922) ii, 591. Perhaps they returned ‘unhappily’ because hopes of gaining plunder from an invasion across the border were frustrated when the invasion failed to materialise. 47 ... et Scoti et Galwithienses fere totam patriam illam depopulati sunt : BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fo. 59v (Stratum 25, entered sometime after 2 February 1259 and probably before mid 1264: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 157–8); Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 116; Anderson, Early Sources ii, 593. 48 The Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland , ed. and trans. Bartlett, xli; 84–5 (chap. 6). ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 65 from Melrose. It is reported there that, on 23 September 1168, three individuals from south of the Forth ‘were killed by deceit of the Scots’. 49 The impression here is that Scots are untrustworthy, which the chroniclers at Holyrood would hardly have allowed if they considered themselves to be numbered among them! Unfortunately none of these texts, by their nature, lend themselves readily to an extended discourse on how to define a Scot. Exactly what the chroniclers of Melrose meant by ‘Scots’ has to be inferred from occasional passing references, without any guarantee of consistency across generations of scribes and editors. Clearly ‘Scots’ in the account of 1258 was not simply a generic term for all Gaelic speakers; the Galwegians were Gaelic speakers too. The simplest interpretation of ‘Scots’ here would be as inhabitants of ‘Scotland’, which until the early thirteenth century was defined as north of the Forth. 50 This could, on the face of it, be supported by the chronicle’s record of events in 1216, in which we are told that Alexander II exempted Scoti from serving in the army which he raised to enter into England. The king took an aid from them instead. It is known that those who contributed to this included men on Arbroath abbey’s tofts in royal burghs. 51 It is unlikely, however, that ‘Scots’ here meant everyone from north of the Forth, lumping the monks of Arbroath and their burgess retainers together with the rest of the predominantly rural, native
49 fraude Scottorum interfecti sunt : A Scottish Chronicle known as the Chronicle of Holyrood , ed. Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson with some additional notes by Alan Orr Anderson (Scottish History Society: Edinburgh 1938), 151 (and see comment at 37). The chronicle becomes a contemporary Scottish source from 1150, kept at Holyrood until sometime between 1171 and 1186 (probably 1186), and subsequently at Coupar Angus until 1189 (see discussion at 35–9). 50 D. Broun, ‘Defining Scotland and the Scots before the wars of independence’, in Image and Identity: The Making and Re making of Scotland through the Ages , edd. Dauvit Broun, Richard J. Finlay and Michael Lynch (Edinburgh 1998), 4–17, at 6–7. 51 Alexander II confirmed that this would not create a precedent against the abbey’s immunity: Liber S. Thome de Aberbrothoc Registrum Abbacie de Aberbrothoc , edd. P. Chalmers and C. Innes, 2 vols. (Bannatyne Club: Edinburgh), i (1848), 80 (no. 111); see also 79 (no. 110). 66 DAUVIT BROUN
Gaelic speaking population. For a start, the chroniclers of Melrose by 1258 did not use ‘Scots’ simply to mean the inhabitants of ‘Scotland’. When the events of 1216 were entered into the chronicle in 1218 (or soon thereafter), ‘Scotland’ was used of the kingdom as a whole. 52 The monks of Melrose thought of themselves as living in Scotland, but did not regard themselves as Scots. If ‘Scots’ preserved an earlier sense of people living north of the Forth, then there may have been some factor at work other than geography which allowed this usage of the term to retain its relevance. This is reinforced by the distinction drawn in the minds of Dunfermline monks between a local and a Scot. Clearly for them, too, not all those living north of the Forth were Scots. In the case of the Melrose Chronicle the enduring distinguishing feature of Scots is not difficult to find. In the eyes of the monks of Melrose, ‘Scots’ were marked out particularly by their bad behaviour. 53 We are told, in the account of the first muster of the army in 1258, that the Scots and Galwegians ate meat even on Good Friday. On the face of it, it is difficult to say whether this really happened, or whether the Melrose chronicler thought it was plausible because he expected Scots and Galwegians to be ungodly. There is, however, a clear cut example of a negative stereotype creating detail which never occurred in reality. In the annal for 1235 (probably entered into the chronicle in 1240), the killing of the prior and sacrist of the abbey of Tongland by ‘Scots’ was followed by a particularly callous act. It is likely that these Scots were men of 52 BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fo. 32v (Stratum 9, entered probably in 1218 or not long thereafter: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 134; Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 62, where towns in the Merse are described as ‘in the southern part of Scotland’ when King John of England wasted them in 1216; at 64, where Galloway is described as ‘in the western part of Scotland’ in an account of a supernatural event witnessed there in 1216. 53 What follows is discussed in more detail in D. Broun, ‘Becoming Scottish in the thirteenth century: the evidence of the Chronicle of Melrose’, in West Over Sea. Studies in Scandinavian Sea Borne Expansion and Settlement before 1300. A Festschrift in Honour of Dr Barbara E. Crawford , edd. Beverley Ballin Smith, Simon Taylor and Gareth Williams (Leiden 2007), 19–32, at 24–5. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 67
Menteith, whose earl had been left in charge in Galloway following the suppression of a revolt.54 There is no reason to doubt that Tongland suffered violence at their hands; the callous act these Scots then went on to perpetrate, however, bears an uncanny resemblance to a report of a Scottish atrocity in the annal for 1216. 55 The heinous incident described in 1216 has plainly been added to the 1235 account.56 Presumably it seemed to monks at Melrose that such sacrilegious savagery was the kind of thing that Scoti were liable to perpetrate. There must be a strong suspicion that the same occurred when the devastations by Scots and Galwegians in 1258 were written up, garnishing the account with an allegation of disregard for basic Christian observance. 57 For the monks of Melrose, therefore, ‘Scots’ was a term loaded with cultural significance, conjuring up an image of people who lived beyond the realm of common Christian decency. There is at least a hint that, for monks of Dunfermline, ‘Scot’ may also have had negative connotations. Apart from the Scot mentioned alongside the local girl, only one other person is designated as such in the Miracles
54 BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fo. 43v (Stratum 17, entered probably early 1240: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 145); Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 84; Anderson, Early Sources ii, 497. 55 Broun, ‘Becoming Scottish in the thirteenth century’, 24–5. BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fo. 33r (Stratum 9, entered probably in 1218 or not long thereafter: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 134); Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 63; Anderson, Early Sources ii, 407–8. 56 The similarity of the two passages was pointed out by A. O. Anderson ( Early Sources ii, 497, nn. 2 & 3), and by W. Croft Dickinson in Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 248 (where it is observed that ‘probably all this account [in 1235] is artificial’). 57 The only other occasion in which chroniclers at Melrose referred contemporaneously (or nearly so) to Scots en masse is in the account of William I’s invasion of Northumbria in 1173, in which ‘the Scots cruelly burned with fire a great part of Northumbria, and they savagely pierced with the sword its populace’: BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fo. 21v (Stratum 5, entered after 17 March 1199, probably in the first decade of the thirteenth century: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 129–30); Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 40; Anderson, Early Sources ii, 278. 68 DAUVIT BROUN of St Margaret : ‘a certain Scot by birth and a very impudent man’. 58 This could mean that impudence and being a Scot were thought to go naturally together, in the same way that the reference to the deceit of the Scots in the Holyrood Chronicle could suggest that perfidy was not an unexpected Scottish trait. Also, as far as Gaelic is concerned, although no specific reference to language is made in the Chronicle of Melrose, it is surely not too fanciful to infer that the Melrose (and perhaps Dunfermline and Holyrood) identikit picture of a typical Scot would also have included Gaelic as a distinguishing feature. This would have been one of the most obvious differences between the majority of people north of the Forth and the monks of Arbroath or their burgh living men, or the monks of Dunfermline and those living next to them in Dunfermline. Those dwelling in Arbroath or Dunfermline would hardly have been regarded by a Melrose chronicler as having much in common with those who went on the rampage in 1216. Gaelic would also have been an instantly recognised characteristic shared with the Galwegians who were paired with the Scots in their sacrilege of 1258. But does this mean that all Gaelic speakers would automatically have been regarded as barbarians by cloistered communities in the south and east? So far the discussion has of necessity focused on a few snippets of text. One way of supplementing this meagre diet is by considering writings by authors who could not in any normal way be regarded as Scottish, but whose work would have been regarded as authoritative (by monks and clerics, at least), and can be shown to have been read and repeated approvingly in texts of Scottish origin.59 58 Scotico quidem genere et nimis proteruo : The Miracles of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland , ed. and trans. Bartlett, 74–5. Proteruus could also mean ‘violent’ or ‘wanton’. 59 This is not to deny, of course, that many other important texts would have been potentially opinion forming (such as Bartholomew the Englishman’s popular encyclopaedia), but there is no evidence for how Scots may have reacted to material relating to Scotland in these works. For an example of a Scottish student in Oxford’s disapproval of material in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum , see G. W. S. Barrow, The Anglo Norman Era in Scottish History (Oxford 1980), 2. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 69
An important example is the lamentation on the death of David I written by Aelred of Rievaulx. 60 The praise of a famous king of Scots by a leading monastic writer is likely to have been well known and cherished in Scotland (and especially so in Melrose, a daughter house of Rievaulx founded by David I). It was an important source for the history of St Margaret’s ancestors and descendants that lies behind Gesta Annalia I. 61 As for Aelred himself, he was during his lifetime a close friend of David I and his son Earl Henry. At an early stage in his career he had been an official in David I’s household. When he
60 For Aelred’s text (under the title Genealogia Regum Anglorum ), see Patrologiae Cursus Completus … Series Latina , ed. J. P. Migne, vol. cxcv (Paris 1855), cols. 711– 38. There is a need for a modern edition of this text, not least due to complications unforeseen in Anselm Hoste, Bibliotheca Aelrediana: a survey of the manuscripts, old catalogues, editions and studies concerning St Aelred of Rievaulx , Instrumenta Patristica ii (The Hague 1962), 111–14. The chief problem is that the text published by J. P. Migne (a reprint of Twysden’s edition) is an abbreviated version of Aelred’s work. Because much of the version actually written by Aelred was copied into book V of Fordun’s Chronicle (and thus appears in Bower’s Scotichronicon ), the new edition of Scotichronicon is the only place where Aelred’s ‘original’ text may be consulted―albeit only a section of it, and in a late copy (but with the added benefit of a translation): Scotichronicon iii, edd. and trans. MacQueen, MacQueen and Watt, 138–69. The status of this in relation to the lost archetype has yet to be determined, of course. The section of Aelred’s Genealogia quoted in Fordun’s Chronicle and Bower’s Scotichronicon has hitherto been regarded mistakenly as a separate work entitled Eulogium Davidis Regis Scotorum (see, e.g., the comment on Scotichronicon book V chapter 45 in ibid . iii, 261). The seed of this error was sown by John Pinkerton’s decision to publish this section of the Genealogia on its own, taking it from London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius B xi (as Pinkerton himself noted: John Pinkerton, Vitae Antiquae Sanctorum qui habitaverunt in ea Parte Britanniae qui nunc vocatur Scocia (London 1789), viii). On inspection, this turns out to be a copy of the full version of Aelred’s Genealogia (fos. 109ra–125ra). The Eulogium is therefore simply a section of the Genealogia which had no independent existence until it was printed by Pinkerton (who gave it the title Eulogium Davidis Regis Scotorum ). These problems are briefly outlined by Marsha Dutton in Aelred of Rievaulx: The Historical Works , trans. Jane Patricia Freeland and ed. Marsha L. Dutton, Cistercian Fathers Series no. 56 (Kalamazoo 2005), 35–6; a new translation of the Genealogia is at 41–122. 61 I am very grateful to Alice Taylor for giving me access to her unpublished analysis of the earliest stages of the text that survives today as Gesta Annalia I. 70 DAUVIT BROUN later joined the Cistercian house at Rievaulx and went on to become its abbot, he would have maintained his ties with Scotland through Rievaulx’s daughter houses. 62 Aelred’s views may therefore be taken as representing a significant current of opinion in the kingdom itself, at least in the mid twelfth century. There are a number of instances in the lamentation on David I’s death in which Aelred made plain his view of Scots. In one place he praised David for taming the ‘total barbarity of that people’ so that, ‘forgetting its natural fierceness, it submitted its neck to the laws which the king’s meekness dictated, and gratefully accepted peace, of which it knew nothing up to that point’. 63 In another extended passage (quoted in Gesta Annalia )64 he described how David had transformed Scotland from a harsh land of famine to a fertile country with trading ports, castles and cities. The people, he said, were no longer naked or clothed with rough cloaks, but wore fine linen and purple cloth. Their savage behaviour had been calmed by the Christian religion. Chastity in marriage and clerical celibacy, which (it is stated) were largely unknown beforehand, had been imposed by King David, and church attendance and payment of offerings and teinds to the Church had been made regular. Aelred’s portrayal is obviously dramatic and overdrawn. It was intended as a vivid example of how Aelred’s idea of good kingship would lead inevitably to peace and prosperity. The vision of Scottish barbarity which he articulated was not entirely of his own making, however. John Gillingham in particular has argued that, during the second quarter of the twelfth century, English writers began to regard their Celtic neighbours as barbarians not just in a general
62 Melrose and Newbattle were daughter houses founded by David I before Aelred became abbot; during his abbacy David founded a daughter house of Melrose at Kinloss and Malcolm IV established another daughter house at Coupar Angus. 63 Unde tota illa gentis illius barbaries manseufacta ... ut naturalis sevicie, legibus, quas regia mansuetudo dictabat, colla submitteret, et pacem, quam eatenus nesciebat, gratanter acciperet. Scotichronicon iii, edd. MacQueen, MacQueen and Watt, 144–5 (for text and trans.) 64 Ibid ., 158–9; Chron. Fordun i, 436–7. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 71 sense of being outlandish, but specifically due to what was regarded as their savage conduct of war, economic underdevelopment, and primitive social mores .65 These depictions of ‘Celtic backwardness’ include all the elements (and more) noted by Aelred. There is little direct evidence, however, for how this theme may have been treated by men of letters in Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although most of these texts must have been known to them. Another example of a text by a non Scottish author which was evidently read attentively and used by some Scottish churchmen is the letter of Nicholas of Evesham to Eadmer, bishop elect of St Andrews, in 1120, in which an argument was assembled for St Andrews’ claim to be an archbishopric. Most of Nicholas’s text was retained by Scottish churchmen (in the form of a tract) and deployed by them in the 1160s (if not before) in their struggle to resist attempts by the archbishop of York to enforce the obedience of Scottish bishops. 66 It can be suggested, therefore, that the tract as it
65 John Gillingham, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992) 392–409; idem , ‘The English invasion of Ireland’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the origins of conflict, 1534–1660 , edd. Brendan Bradshaw et al . (Cambridge 1993), 24–42, republished in John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge 2000), 3–18, 145–60. 66 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 139, 167r/v (in foliation of M. R. James), or 165r/v (P. Hunter Blair’s reckoning based on the actual run of folios: see his ‘Some observations on the Historia Regum ’, cited below, at 64 n. 2). It was added to the manuscript along with a poetic vision of Mael Coluim IV written shortly after his death (9 December 1165): see P. Hunter Blair, ‘Some observations on the Historia Regum attributed to Symeon of Durham’, in Celt and Saxon: Studies in the Early British Border , ed. N. K. Chadwick (Cambridge 1963), 63–118, at 69. For September 1164 as the date of this manuscript, see ibid ., 77–8, and D. N. Dumville, ‘The Corpus Christi ‘Nennius’’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 25 (1972–4) 369–80, at 371, where it is also observed that the quire which contains this Scottish material (quire XX) ‘may be a somewhat later addition to the volume’. The only other item in quire XX is a fragment of a saga with strong York associations (Hunter Blair, ‘Some observations on the Historia Regum ’, 69), although seven folios may now be lost (ibid ., 63). Perhaps the tract based on Nicholas of Evesham’s letter was produced by Scottish churchmen in their confrontation with Archbishop Roger of Bishopsbridge at Norham in 1164 (Dumville, ‘The Corpus Christi ‘Nennius’’, 371; on this encounter, 72 DAUVIT BROUN stands was regarded as acceptable, at least to the clerical elite in St Andrews. 67 One part of Nicholas of Evesham’s prose which was retained unaltered was where Nicholas argued that the bishop of St Andrews was in practice an archbishop, ‘although the barbarism of the people is unaware of the honour of the pallium’68 (the symbol of office granted by popes to archbishops). As far as Nicholas was concerned, it seems, the Scots were remote from what he regarded as the civilized world. By the 1160s this would not have been regarded by leading churchmen in St Andrews as applying to them. But they could have been prepared to accept the ‘barbarity’ of their Gaelic predecessors as one way of helping to explain their predicament in seeking recognition of archiepiscopal status without being able to point to the precedent of a pope granting the pallium. The most prominent element in the image of Scottish barbarism which these texts and the Chronicle of Melrose share is that of ungodliness, ranging from ignorance of the norms of Christendom to acts of savagery and sacrilege. Something similar is suggested by the reference to deceitful Scots in the Holyrood Chronicle. And the same idea is found in an account of St Margaret’s English ancestors and Scottish royal descendants written at Dunfermline ca 1250 or soon thereafter. 69 There we are told that ‘the Scots were ignorant before the coming of the blessed Margaret, and were not entirely familiar see most recently D. E. R. Watt, Medieval Church Councils in Scotland (Edinburgh 2000), 21). 67 By the 1160s Glasgow may have been wary of St Andrews’ claim to be an archbishopric (see Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain , 144–6). If there is a connection between the text and the confrontation at Norham in 1164 (see previous note), however, then it may be noteworthy that the Scottish delegation was led by Ingram, archdeacon of Glasgow (and soon afterwards bishop elect of Glasgow); but Ingram was also the king’s chancellor, which could explain why he took so prominent a role. (At this point the bishop of St Andrews had yet to be consecrated, and there may have been a vacancy in the bishopric of Glasgow.) 68 licet barbaries gentis pallii honorem ignoret . 69 Broun, Irish Identity , 196. The text is unpublished. It survives uniquely in Madrid, Royal Palace Library, MS II. 2097, fos. 21v–25v, a Dunfermline manuscript produced during the reign of James III (1460–88). See comments in Scotichronicon iii, edd. MacQueen, MacQueen and Watt, xvii–xviii. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 73 with God’s law’. 70 Here, as in Aelred, there is a clear sense that there were Scots in the present who, through the agency of St Margaret or David, were no longer ignorant barbarians. The possibility of improvement could also be read into the snippet from Nicholas of Evesham. Only in the Chronicle of Melrose is this absent. Perhaps the Melrose chroniclers shared Aelred’s view that the Scots were naturally fierce and unruly. 71 The idea that ‘Scots’ were sacrilegious savages cannot have been too deeply ingrained, however, because in due course the monks of Melrose identified themselves as ‘Scots’. This was obviously not the case when the events of 1258 were written up, but this change had occurred a generation later, when events in the mid 1260s were belatedly added to the chronicle sometime between 14 April 1286 and (probably) May 1291.72 By then, for example, it was said of one of their number, Reginald of Roxburgh, with regard to his successful diplomatic efforts to win the Hebrides for Alexander III in 1266, that ‘none out of the sons of the Scots has ever been able to accomplish this mission except for the aforesaid monk’. 73 Also, the same editor of the chronicle, in a tract on Simon de Montfort’s rising which is highly favourable to de Montfort, described Guy de Balliol, Simon de Montfort’s standard bearer at the fateful battle of Evesham, as ‘by nation a Scot’. 74 Finally let us return to Fordun’s Chronicle . It will be recalled that the texts hitherto ascribed to John of Fordun can now be recognised as originating at least a century earlier. It has been proposed that the core narrative beginning with Scottish origins was originally conceived by Richard Vairement, writing possibly in the 1260s. 75 This was then significantly enlarged to something akin to what 70 rudes enim erant Scoti ante adventum beate Margarite, et legem Dei perfecte non noverunt : fo. 23r. 71 See 70, above. 72 Stratum 38: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 168–9. 73 Ibid. , 129: quidem nuncium nullus uncquam ex filiis Scottorum potuit procurare preter monachum predictum . Such flowery language is fairly typical of this section. 74 Ibid ., 131: nacione Scotus . On this tract ( Opusculum de Simone ) and its authorship, see ibid ., xix–xx. 75 Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain , 252–60. 74 DAUVIT BROUN survives as Fordun’s Chronicle (hence its designation as ‘proto Fordun’) and continued (in what survives today as Gesta Annalia I) to 1285, which was probably when this work was completed. 76 It may not be possible to determine once and for all whether the famous passage on the ‘Highland/Lowland divide’ in Fordun’s Chronicle was penned by Fordun himself, by the author of ‘proto Fordun’, or by Richard Vairement. It is significant, however, that Gesta Annalia I (i.e., the surviving part of ‘proto Fordun’, completed in 1285) includes some references to ‘highland Scots’ which have not hitherto received much discussion because the text was mistakenly assumed to be by Fordun himself. 77 There is a particularly striking passage in Gesta Annalia I’s account of William I’s invasion of England in 1173. He went, we are told, ‘with the highland Scots, whom they call brutes, and the Galwegians, who knew not how to spare either place or person, but raged after the manner of beasts’, devastating Northumberland. 78 The following year, after William’s capture at Alnwick and imprisonment at Falaise in Normandy, ‘the Scots and Galwegians ... wickedly and ruthlessly slew their French and English neighbours’. 79 The rampaging Scots of 1174 were presumably understood to be the same sort who devastated Northumberland the previous year. The next specific mention of a ‘highland Scot’ is in a very different setting. At
76 Ibid ., 216–29. 77 For reasons why Fordun cannot be the author, see ibid ., 223–30. 78 ... per montanos Scotos, quos brutos uocant, et Galwalenses, qui nec locis nec personis parcere norunt, sed bestiali more seuiendo ... : Chron. Fordun i, 262; ii, 257– 8. The equivalent passage in Scotichronicon has been added to and rewritten significantly: Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. iv, edd. and trans. David J. Corner, A. B. Scott, William W. Scott and D. E. R. Watt (Edinburgh 1994), 310–11 (where brutos is treated without any obvious justification as a proper noun and translated ‘Britons’ on the grounds that Fordun was punning here on Britones bearing in mind that it had become an historiographical commonplace to identify Brutus as the Britons’ eponymous ancestor: see comment at ibid . iv, 514). 79 ... Scoti cum Galwalensibus ... Francos affines et Anglos impie et immisericorditer : Chron. Fordun i, 264; ii, 259. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 75 the inauguration of Alexander III we are told that ‘a certain highland Scot, kneeling suddenly before the throne, bowing his head, greeted the king in the mother tongue with these Scottish [i.e., Gaelic] words, saying: Beannachd Dhé, rí Albanach , Alexanndar mac Alexanndair meic Uilleim meic Énri meic Daibhidh , and by proclaiming in this way read the genealogy of the kings of Scots to the end’. 80 In both these instances it is likely that the term ‘highland Scot’ was chosen by the author of ‘proto Fordun’. The first passage is related to the account of the invasion of 1173 in the Chronicle of Melrose. If the Chronicle of Melrose here repeats the draft which Professor Duncan has argued lies behind Gesta Annalia , then ‘highland’ would be a later addition by the author of ‘proto Fordun’.81 It has also been shown that the description of Alexander III’s inauguration represents a brief contemporary account that has been significantly enlarged in ‘proto Fordun’.82 Again, the author of ‘proto Fordun’ is likely to be responsible for the use of ‘highland’ here. This suggests that he considered ‘highland Scots’ to be distinguished in one instance by their savagery and in the other case by the use of Gaelic.83 Here, then, we may have a writer who used the term ‘highland’ as a way of distinguishing Scots who were Gaelic speaking barbarians from other Scots. This is not the only similarity with the oft quoted passage in Fordun’s Chronicle . There ‘highland’ is not only associated with
80 ... quidam Scotus montanus ante thronum subito genuflectens materna lingua regem inclinato capite salutauit hiis Scoticis uerbis , dicens: ‘Benach de Re Albanne Alexander mac Alexander mac Uleyham mac Henri mac Dauid, et sic pronunciando regum Scottorum genealogiam usque in finem legebat : Chron. Fordun i, 294; ii, 290. 81 A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Sources and uses of the Chronicle of Melrose, 1165–1297’, in Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500–1297, ed. Simon Taylor (Dublin 2000), 146–85, at 147–50, 163–74: see also 176 (item 10) for collation of this passage in Gesta Annalia with the Chronicle of Melrose. 82 Broun, Scottish Independence , 174–9. 83 There are other occasions in the text where ‘Scots’ is used as a term for the kingdom’s inhabitants in general; e.g., in 1165 we are told that Henry II sent his Wardens of the Marches ‘prudently to draw from the Scots peace rather than war’ (pacem pocius a Scotis quam bellum prudenter allicere ): Chron. Fordun i, 260; ii, 255. 76 DAUVIT BROUN fierce Gaelic speakers, but it is also stated that they are particularly savage against the English, and against Scots who do not speak Gaelic. This may be matched in ‘proto Fordun’ with the heightened account of attacks against English and French neighbours in 1174 following King William’s capture at Alnwick: 84 At that time also there took place a most wretched and widespread persecution of the English both in Scotland and Galloway. So intense was it that no consideration was shown to the sex of any [of the victims], but in most places all were cruelly killed without thought of ransom, wherever they could be found. The most distinctive feature of the famous passage in Fordun’s Chronicle , however, is the insistence that ‘Highlanders’ are ‘loyal and obedient to their king and country’, and, if governed properly, ‘are obedient and ready enough to respect the law’. There is a suggestion of this positive element in the account in ‘proto Fordun’ of the killing of Uhtred son of Fergus of Galloway by his brother Giolla Brigde in 1174. We are told that the Galwegians, led by Giolla Brigde, ‘treacherously hatched a conspiracy ... and separating themselves off from the kingdom of Scotland ...’, captured Uhtred; but ‘because he had shown himself a true Scot and could not be deflected from this stance’, they mutilated Uhtred, and killed him. 85 Uhtred, as a native Galwegian, would presumably have been regarded by the author as capable of the same savagery as the Galwegians and ‘highland Scots’ had together been described
84 Persecucio quoque tunc Anglorum miserima maximaque tam in Scocia quam Galwallia facta est ita quod nullius generis parceretur sexui quin pleris in locis ac ubicumque percipi poterant omni spreta redempcione crudeliter interirent : Chron. Fordun i, 264 (but note that up to facta est is not in the recension represented by DDD and III, for which see Broun, ‘A new look at Gesta Annalia ’, 10–11; ii, 259. The same is found (with minor variations) in Scotichronicon iv, edd. Corner et al. , 314–15: my translation is based on this. 85 ... proditiore ... coniuracione facta se a regno Scocie ... diuidente ... Ochtredus itaque filius Fergusii quia uerus extiterat Scotu, nec flecti potuit ... captus est ... crudeliter interemptus est : Chron. Fordun i, 266; ii, 261; also Scotichronicon iv, edd. Corner et al ., 322–3, from where the translation has been taken. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 77 committing the previous year. But Uhtred is here a ‘true Scot’ because of his loyalty to the king and kingdom of Scotland. All in all, it appears that the author of ‘proto Fordun’ shared sentiments about the ‘Highlands’ that were strikingly in tune with those expressed in the famous passage in Fordun’s Chronicle ―so much so that a close connection between the passage and his work seems probable. The simplest scenario, of course, would be that the famous passage was penned by the author of ‘proto Fordun’ himself. The alternative is that the passage already existed in Vairement’s work, and influenced the thinking of the author of ‘proto Fordun’. An important consideration here is Martin MacGregor’s discussion of the encyclopaedia of Bartholomew the Englishman as a source for the passage.86 The encyclopaedia was a popular work, so it is possible that Vairement, if he was writing in the 1260s, could have had access to it within a couple of decades of its completion.87 It is obviously easier, however, to envisage the author of ‘proto Fordun’ using it a generation later. As far as Fordun himself is concerned, it is hard to see how he could been influenced by the scraps in Gesta Annalia I noted above; if he was the author of the passage, it would have to be supposed that he arrived independently at the same ideas. The fact that his Chronicle is based so profoundly on ‘proto Fordun’ makes it easy to envisage him as simply a copyist in this instance. The most likely author of the oft quoted passage, therefore, is the same scholar who created ‘proto Fordun’. There is reason to suspect that he may himself have been a Gaelic speaker. 88 I would like to draw this discussion to a close by suggesting a new context for the beginnings of the perception of a ‘Highland/Lowland’ dichotomy. Elements of this are necessarily speculative, given the quality and quantity of some of the evidence. At the very least, however, this may open doors for further discussion, and take us 86 See 14–15, above. 87 The earliest authors to use it were in Germany, where Bartholomew wrote the work: see Seymour et al ., Bartholomaeus Anglicus , 33–4, where it is also noted that the earliest dated reference is in 1284 (in Paris). 88 Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain , 260. 78 DAUVIT BROUN away from too rigid an approach to the issue fixed on the mid to late fourteenth century. There are two strands to what I wish to propose. The first is to look for a path of development leading up to the first deployment of topographical terminology in a Scottish text. The second is to look for a context in terms of ideology rather than cultural, economic, or other ‘real’ circumstances. Most of the material which has been discussed was written by monks and clerics who, although writing from within the kingdom’s bounds, did not regard themselves as Scots. In their view Scots, the predominant Gaelic speakers north of the Forth, were essentially barbarians. But, in the eyes of some (at least), there were Scots who were ‘civilized’ by accepting ‘godly’ ways. It may be inferred from this that there was an assumption that Gaelic speakers were barbarians, but that they could become part of ‘civilized’ French speaking society, without necessarily forsaking their Gaelic milieu. It is notable, for example, that in Jordan Fantosme’s vivid account of King William’s invasions of northern England in 1173, Scots and Galwegians are portrayed in terms remarkably similar to what can be inferred from the Chronicle of Melrose; 89 nonetheless, there is no suggestion that Donnchadh earl of Fife is a barbarian when he spoke ‘like a baron’, ‘very wisely’, offering advice to his king. 90 An example of such a person at home in both Anglo French and Gaelic aristocratic worlds would be Giolla Brigde, earl of Strathearn (1171– 1223), who took an Anglo French bride, christened his eldest son Giolla Crìosd, included in his court both Anglo French knights and Gaelic officials, and founded an Augustinian priory which included in its ranks someone who was able and willing to use Gaelic orthography in Latin charters. 91 By the late thirteenth century a
89 Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle , ed. and trans. R. C. Johnston (Oxford 1981), 52 (trans. 53): ‘That miserable race ( gent ), on whom God’s curse, the Gallovidians, who covet wealth, and the Scots who dwell north of the Forth ( li Escot qui sunt en Albanie ) have no faith in God, the son of Mary: they destroy churches and indulge in wholesale robbery’. Albanie (rather than Escoce ) is also found in ll. 6, 356, 408, 523. 90 Ibid ., 22 ( cume barun ) and 24. 91 See Cynthia J. Neville, ‘A Celtic enclave in Norman Scotland: Earl Gilbert and the ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 79 major change in Scottish identity had occurred which would have had an impact on how any vision of Gaelic barbarity may have been expressed within the kingdom’s bounds. The monks at Melrose, and doubtless others in Scotland who had previously regarded the ‘Scots’ as ‘others’, now identified themselves as Scots. It would no longer have made sense for these ‘new’ Scots, as it were, to regard Scots in general as naturally barbaric, or as necessarily Gaelic speaking, with some managing to surmount this by acquiring ‘civilized’ ways. It must now have been envisaged that there were Scots, like them, who were essentially ‘civilized’, and had never been native Gaelic speakers. In these circumstances a particular label, such as ‘highland Scot’, would have been needed for ‘uncivilized’ Scots, or for those particularly associated with Gaelic culture. According to this line of argument, then, the terms ‘Highland’ (and implicitly ‘Lowland’) may have grown out of an earlier perceived cultural differentiation. The association of the ‘uncivilized’ with mountains would not of itself have been a particularly original idea, of course.92 It may have begun to crystallize in a Scottish context, however, because of the fundamental change in what being a Scot signified which occurred (in the case of Melrose, at least) sometime in the 1270s and/or 1280s. The second strand I wish to propose arises from the obvious fact that everything I have discussed relates specifically to monks and clerics who belonged to institutions founded (or recreated) as part of a European wide movement of religious and social renewal espoused by kings of Scots in the twelfth century. As far as Aelred is earldom of Strathearn, 1171–1223’, in Freedom and Authority: Scotland c. 1050–c. 1650. Historical and Historiographical Essays presented to Grant G. Simpson , edd. Terry Brotherstone and David Ditchburn (East Linton 2000), 75–92; but for the suggestion that he had limited enthusiasm for cultivating links with Anglo Norman circles and preferred to ‘withdraw’ to Strathearn, see eadem , Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140–1365 (Dublin 2005), 19–23, although I am not convinced by the premises on which this judgement is based. On Gaelic orthography in Inchaffray charters, see Dauvit Broun, ‘Gaelic literacy in eastern Scotland between 1124 and 1249’, in Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies , ed. Huw Pryce (Cambridge 1998), 183–201, at 194–6. 92 See chapter 1, and 59, above. 80 DAUVIT BROUN concerned, civilisation was a powerful metaphor for his radical vision of a godly society. This required an equally powerful image of the barbarian as a contrast. But would the torch of reform have shone so brightly in the thirteenth century? In one sense it might have. It is clear that the monks of Dunfermline gained an enduring sense of their significance by presenting their saintly founder (whose relics they venerated) as the agent of Scotland’s supposed emergence out of the darkness of ignorance. Presumably the monks of Melrose would have sought similar reassurance of their importance from Aelred’s account of how their founder, David I, brought civilization, godliness and prosperity to Scotland. What may, however, have been particularly in their minds by this period was civilization as a metaphor for peace and order under the firm rule of the king. Certainly, the suppression of resistance to royal authority was vigorously celebrated by ‘Lowland’ writers, and, typically, such resistance was led by those whom they would have regarded as ‘unimproved’ Gaels. 93 On this question, however, we seem to be on surer ground particularly in the surviving part of ‘proto Fordun’ ( Gesta Annalia I), where a much more pronounced concern for law and order can be detected. Its account of the political disturbances of the 1250s can be contrasted with that in the Chronicle of Melrose. Melrose gives a highly partisan account in which Durward and his followers are excoriated
93 See, for example, the treatment of Somhairle (Somerled) in 1164 ( Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 36–7), Dòmhnall mac Uilleim in 1187 ( ibid ., 46; A Scottish Chronicle known as the Chronicle of Holyrood , ed. Anderson, 171, 193); and also the Mac Uilleim rising of 1230, Galloway rising of 1235, and less dramatically, the Manx rising of 1275, in Chronicon de Lanercost, M.CC.I. – M.CCC.XLVI , ed. Joseph Stevenson (Bannatyne Club: Edinburgh 1839): 40–2, 98. For translations, see Anderson, Early Sources ii, 254–5, 312–13, 471, 498 n. 1, 672–3. The Chronicle of Lanercost up to 1297 is the work of Richard of Durham, a Franciscan friar based at Haddington in 1270 and then (by 1294) at Berwick: see A. G. Little, Franciscan Papers, Lists and Documents (Manchester 1943), 42–54, at 46–8 (reprinted from English Historical Review 31 (1916) 269–79 and 32 (1917) 28–9), and Duncan, ‘Sources and uses’, 175 and n. 107. ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 81 as traitors. 94 Gesta Annalia is also somewhat biased, in its case in favour of Durward. Instead of talking of treason, however, the commentary against Durward’s opponents is focussed on the deleterious effect of their rule on the country as a whole. At one point the situation is vividly described:95 but there were as many kings as there were counsellors; for in those days he who saw the oppression of the poor, the disinheriting of nobles, the burden laid upon the inhabitants, the violations of churches, might with good reason say: woe unto the kingdom where the king is a boy. Later, when Durward had been ousted for a second time by these counsellors, this provokes another lament for the lack of good government: 96 As a result this latest deviation was worse than the first. From that time on there arose many acts of persecution and many tribulations among the magnates of Scotland. For these more recent counsellors of
94 BL Cotton Faustina B. IX fos. 56r–58v (Stratum 25, entered after 2 February 1259 and probably before mid 1264: Broun and Harrison, Chronicle of Melrose i, 157–8); Chronicle of Melrose , edd. Anderson and Anderson, 109–14; Anderson, Early Sources ii, 571, 580–3, 588–90. 95 sed quot fuerunt consules, tot fuerunt reges. Quia si quis uiderat hiis diebus oppressiones pauparum, exherediciones nobilium, angariam ciuium, uiolentias ecclesiarum, merito diceret: ue, regno, ubi rex est puer : Chron. Fordun i, 297; ii, 292. The passage is repeated, with some additions and minor amendments, in Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. v, edd. and trans. Simon Taylor and D. E. R. Watt, with Brian Scott (Aberdeen 1990), 302–3: my translation is partly based on the translation there. 96 Et sic fuit error nouissimus peior priore. Multe persecuciones ex tunc et tribulaciones inter Scotorum proceres suborte sunt, quia posteriores regis consules damna et mala anterius perpessa in priores refundere nitebantur. Unde tales pauperum contriciones et ecclesiarum spoliaciones sequebantur quales uise non sunt in Scocia nostris temporibus : Chron. Fordun i, 298; ii, 293. The passage is repeated word for word except for nostris temporibus (which is changed to temporibus priscis ) in Scotichronicon v, edd. and trans. Taylor and others, 320–1, from where the translation has been taken. Bower evidently altered nostris temporibus because he did not think it appropriate: ‘in our times’ presumably refers to 1285, when this part of Gesta Annalia was written (see 52, 74, above). 82 DAUVIT BROUN
the king now tried to retaliate against the former counsellors for the losses and injuries they had suffered previously. So there ensued such a grinding down of the poor and spoliation of churches that have not been seen in Scotland in our times. Little is claimed for Durward’s party: they are merely less bad than the others. What is eagerly sought is the peace and stability of firm government by an adult king. In this context the image of ‘highland Scots’ may have operated as one kind of extreme contrast to a vision of the peaceful enjoyment of property guaranteed by the strong government of a king. ‘True Scots’ were those, like Uhtred, who remained loyal to the kingdom. The polar opposite was Uhtred’s brother and killer, whose death, we are told 97 occurred by the will of God, who mercifully heard the constant cries of the poor and needy, and gladly snatched them from the power of stronger men. The suggestion, then, is that the attitude of Gall to Gaedhel (of ‘Lowlander’ to ‘Highlander’) visible in these texts was determined chiefly by a pattern of thinking about Scottish society which had its origins in the twelfth century. It was then that an image of Gaelic barbarity was adopted by those promoting a new social order, particularly cloistered communities staffed largely by English monks and nuns. This image was then available to be picked up and redefined as part of other self conscious projections of a ‘civilized’ ideal, such as the vision of peace and stability under a strong king. But it should not be inferred that this imagery was necessarily endemic or inevitable. In a later era it would be espoused enthusiastically by a writer such as Bower, and ignored by another such as Barbour. 98 There is no reason to doubt that this was also true in the thirteenth century. 97 quod nutu diuino constat fore factum, qui pauperum clamores et egenorum continuos clementer exaudit, et eos de manibus libenter eripit fortiorum : Chron. Fordun i, 269; ii, 264; also Scotichronicon iv, edd. Corner and others, 364–5, from where the translation has been taken (with slight modification). 98 See 56–7 and n. 29, above.